Autumn Lotus Yoga

Today I felt happy & decided to just revel in it.  Sometimes the sensation of “happy” in my world is met with “uh oh, better worry about what will take this good feeling away” and so gets totally trounced & not really enjoyed.  No way, not this time, baby!

After the home warm-up, went to Lynne’s (the Back Bay owner) Hip Hop Yoga class today and my god it was fun.  Loud, rude, thumpin’ music & the ability to relax, shake it, whump, thump & let it all hang out, be funky & weird & vibrant was soooo totally necessary — catharsis through a strong beat is so satisfying. 

Forrest is practiced without music to make it easier to focus on the breath, the internal experience & what the teacher is saying, but self-practice to music is the bomb.  (Do people still say that anymore? I do.  : )  For those who don’t know (and several students & travel companions are all too aware of this : ), my practice when I’m cuttin’ loose & not following a DVD/MP3 is done to Linkin Park, Mute Math, Foo Fighters, Iron Maiden, 3 Doors Down, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Metallica, 80′s pop and, of course, the Chipmunks.  Really, if you haven’t done handstands to G’n'R or sun salutes to the Chipmunks doing “Witch Doctor,” or “Funkytown,” you’re missin’ out. : )

Fun result is of course that being so loose mentally & in such a laid back space really really really translates to loosening up fear/inhibitions/tightness & totally juices up the practice  with happy hormones to the point where some poses I might get stuck on are much easier.

Plus, she gave two songs of “free for all” where you could just play with whatever you wanted to.  I did some classes while in Goa, India that were like that — teacher warmed you up & then set you off —  & it brought back some really good memories of an open-air shala with mosquito-netting for walls/ceiling & a cat mascot at the shoe storage bin.

Rest of the day is pretty prosaically productive (alliteration, also fun! : ) with trips to Goodwill, housecleaning, car inspection… blah blah blah, but all with undercurrent hum of happy hip hop!

Okay, so the song reference is waaay old — but still!!!

Got the dream job I was hoping for and starting mid-August will be assisting a Forrest Yoga class on Wednesday nights and teaching on Thursday nights at Back Bay Yoga, Boston.  Woo hoooooo!!!

It’s funny, getting ready for the audtion I could see so clearly all the options I had to self-sabotage but was amazingly, record-breakingly quite easily able to dismiss them & choose things that would actually help me.  Like, oh, getting a good night’s sleep, doing the 2 hr Forrest Intensive Day 4 to warm up, reviewing my lesson plan over & over & planning adjustments & cues — but also, recognizing that it was just a chance to learn & life would be a-okay if I didn’t get the job.  Taking the pressure off helped keep me centered rather than hyper-spazzed out (which is often the Atomic Squirrel default mode. : )

Afterwards, got to take a teacher-special 2 hr restorative class which the awesome studio owner gave after having spent last week with Judith Lasater in San Francisco.  120 minutes, about 6 poses, with 7 blankets, 3 bolsters, 4 blocks, 2 straps & 1 chair used as props.  Total opposite of my norm & SOOOO nice after all the excitement. 

Plus, discovered that peanut butter, banana & yogurt smoothies are AMAZING.   Beloved Husband can’t believe I hadn’t tried one before today. : )

Big hugs to the loved ones who had more faith than I did on this whole job scenario.  xoxoxoxo to infinity!!

After the high drama rant of yesterday (I love a good vent), today is just a little note & request for good thoughts. 

Got a teaching audition at Hopeful New Yoga Studio tomorrow at noon & would looooove for it to go well.   Since begging and pleading for a job can never truly replace preparation, I’m planning a solid Forrest 1 hour class to give the owner.  Theme is creating & taking up space, featuring lots of hip/shoulder openers & apex pose will be Yoga Nidrasana (both feet behind the head, not actually such a great position for sleepin’!)  

Wish me luck, k? : )

Practices for the past two days have been going well — done pre-practice hour at home, then 90 minute Forrest classes with two great, and very different teachers.  More details on those after tomorrow, once the butterflies have been set free from my stomach to roam again!

A trifecta of influences including a friend (www.schmetterlingyoga.blogspot.com), teacher (Cat Kabira of Back Bay & South Boston Yoga) and a fellow blogger (http://talesofadisorderedeater.org/) have got me cogitating hard.

The topic that keeps coming up is: what to do with uncomfortable, yucky, blech, annoying, just awful feelings.  We all know the ones: shame, misery, self-hatred, depression, take your pick.  We all have our favorites & sometimes can juggle multiple ones simultaneously.

Really, most of us are very talented at going from zero to abject pain in sixty seconds or less.  And I’ve had a lot of issues historically from less-than-stellar means of avoiding/numbing/suppressing these feelings.  (Helllloooooo Tequila, Eating Disorders & Inappropriate Men! : )  

90% of the time, it’s not the immediate physical reality of  that particular moment which hurts – I may be riding on the T feeling crummy because it’s a memory I’m stuck in, a story that keeps repeating in my head, some projected movie of how I imagine others see me, or a delirium about how the future is going to unspool & totally screw me over.

Yoga calls on us to be our authentic selves, and not to run from uncomfortable feelings, whether physical, mental, emotional, whatever.  Parts of the practice can put us into actual physical moments of discomfort & we can train to deal with it with equanimity.  We just acknowledge and be with it and its okay to be sad or grumpy or off balance or uncomfortable or whatever.  Because, really, dealing with the concrete discomfort of squealing quads is a hell of a lot easier than the demons lurking in the fringes of the mind.  I’ll take a five minute hold in Warrior I over battle with those buggers any day.

Showing up as we are, being authentic, is an incredibly healing thing — for god’s sake, it’s our right to feel what we feel and be bitchy when that’s what shows up!!  I’m glad when my friend at Schmetterling Yoga whines & complains & gets that crap off her chest & out of her system.

Suffering is a part of life.  WAAAYYYY too many yoga teachers are all Miss Mary Sunshine & need to be smacked for not speaking out about the tough stuff we all deal with.  It’s part of our obligation to speak up & speak out & be real.

BUT: there’s also this existential relativistic bullshit that needs to be called. Yes, suffering is part of life.  But, hot damn, it’s not ALL of life.

Some feeling states really are better than others. 

Some coping mechanisms are better than others. 

Being depressed sucks.  

Harming ourselves to escape being depressed also sucks. 

Seeking to change a mood, or feeling state or habit of suffering/being a victim in a healthy way can be useful, fun & conducive to general sunshineyness.  (It’s my blog, I can make up words. : )

The space I’m always looking to be in is  centered enough where I can acknowledge my natural, human crummy feelings but there’s this little air gap of choice: choice of whether to pursue being miserable (hey, sometimes it’s okay to just hate the world), or whether to choose a more or less productive means of changing my biochemistry (pranayama or ice cream sundae?? hmmmm…. both good at different times! : ).  

Because without that space, without choice, a brief bout of ennui can turn into a literal death spiral.

It’s worth fighting to touch the witness consciousness where I can work with what I’m feeling  & change my state without wallowing, denial or force.  Because the other choices always seem to involve something illegal, immoral or just plain unnecessary. : )  There’s nothing wrong with feeling like hell.  But there’s also nothing wrong with wanting to feel better.

Today was a “lost” day demonstrating yet again that for me, a morning practice is essential & our habits are best aligned with our natures.  Changing/evolving habits to encourage those that serve us and let go of things that harm us is part of our yoga lives… but sometimes, really, we just gotta go with what works!  Practical reality, people!! : )  I had this notion that I could realign myself as an evening practitioner because there are some cool classes to check out at night.  But, damn it,  if I don’t practice in the morning, it just doesn’t happen well.

There may also be a continuing sleep debt to be repaid because I napped at least twice, perhaps three times, today — Beloved Husband didn’t keep good tabs on my consciousness during some couch lounging. : )  So it’s a 20 minute easy self-practice today & gratitude for rest & reinforced self-knowledge.

But!!!  Tomorrow will be an exciting foray to check out another cool possible studio with a cool new friend for a MORNING class that will be preceded by a nice warm up at home.  First things first, highest priorities before anything else or my world just doesn’t work!!

Am I the only one who still thinks of that guy from U2 every time the phrase “The Edge” comes up in yoga?  Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless… : )

A friend & I were emailing on that topic today.  The first thing folks usually learn is that they’ve hit their “edge” in a pose when their breating becomes short, or labored.  That’s a good first instrument to use. 

But I think it’s a more interesting & complicated concept (of course! : ) than that.  

One of my favorite teachers Heidi Sormaz at Fresh Yoga (www.freshyoga.com; and she’s a Forrest Yoga Mentor), passed on something Ana Forrest told her: the point to exploring our edge isn’t to go into drama or trauma; rather, it helps us find the many levels of sensation that exist between Nothing and Pain. 

A lot of the time we go just directly from numb to excruciating & miss out on the full range between — warmth, tingling, stretch, fatigue, gooey juiciness, just to name a few.  Edge is a tool to find richness of experience, not to beat ourselves into submission.

Edge to me is the places where we find resistance in a pose.  The resistance can be mental (hey, I don’t like this pose!), emotional (I wanna cry or scream in this pose & I don’t know why), physical (ooooh, can’t stretch/hold any more without owie), or just being stuck & losing our ability to breathe.

But that doesn’t mean we have to grit our teeth & force, or back out of the pose, or flee the class physically or bail on ourselves mentally by wandering off to a fantasy or our shopping list.  

The edge is where the pose begins to work out the stuck places in our bodies/minds/spirits.  We stay with ourselves, work to lengthen & smooth & soften the breath, hang out where the sensation may be intense but we can still remain in feeling.

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway cuz I love taking credit for the obvious : ), where our edge is changes moment to moment.   Staying curious about our edge rather than rigidly pursuing X outcome for a pose makes practice alot more fun & keeps us in the vast land between nothing/pain — right where it’s fruitful to live.

Today got a 45 minute warm up, then an awesome Forrest class.   The apex pose was Firefly (Titthibhasana), and the teacher did a nice job sneaking in the warm up poses, including straddles, crows, head-to-ankle as well as some twists.  Helped alot to open up the back (oooooy, my back gets tight!) enough to enjoy Titti.  Yay!!

As I go to classes at Hopeful New Home Studio, it’s hard to turn off  “teacher self” off while being “student self.”   And I’ve stopped fighting it, cuz the whole reason I go to classes is to learn on all levels.   Good, bad or indifferent, there’s something to learn.  (And if the class is bad, or unsafe, or both, you CAN just walk out, btw.  More on that another day.)

Forrest teacher training incorporates a lot of practice teaching & a lot of feedback.  Particular emphasis is put on a couple of things that I consider signatures of a Forrest teacher:

- You’re expected to set & carry a theme as well as an intelligently planned sequence with breathwork, warm up, evolution to a peak pose or two, warm down, then yummy savasana.  The theme might be a particular area of the body that needs healing/exploration, it might be taking pleasure in your practice, or letting go of an issue or stuck energy.  Key for the theme is that it be concrete, visceral, something that can be felt – no imaginary rainbows allowed!

- While doing this, you don’t just loll or wander around–  you also demo, adjust, provide personal attention & conduct the seventeen-ringed circus which is a yoga class.  It’s more like teaching kindergarten than ya might think. : )  A good teacher can be simultaneously cueing the sequence, adjusting one person physically, keeping an eye on and providing verbal adjustments by name to two or three others, all while doing enough yoga along with the class to keep warm enough to demo the peak pose.

- That mellow, spacey, monotone, “yoga teacher” voice is RIGHT OUT.  Forrest is taught really speaking to what’s going on in the room, authentically, lots of variation in tone & volume & use of voice as a tool to integrate what’s happening in the theme/pose/curtail any general mischief that may be occuring. : )

- Repeat words (we all have them — some word you say over & over for the day or the week or lifetime) are also VERBOTEN. (Note clever use of German to sub for repeating “right out.” : )  So is slang, though the occasional well-placed cuss is allowed for emphasis/humor with the right crowd. 

Those are just some of the things I look for when taking class.  Everyone I’ve been to this week has been articulate, competent, accomplished & a couple have really struck my fancy with their vibes.   I’m still looking to sort through the teachers that are good sources of solid, comfortable classes to clean up technique & the ones that will take me to new places… both good things.

Good news also is that today was a delightfully mundane day.  Hour of home practice, 2 hr lovely Forrest class with the theme of self-care, then plain ole normal every day, non-moving-related chores.  Who knew laundry could be so comforting??